| Subject: Astronomers discover smallest known star yet |
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Betty
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Date Posted: 16:17:31 03/29/05 Tue
An international team of astronomers in Paranal Observatory of Chile announced Thursday the discovery of the smallest star ever known in the world.
The star, christened OGLE-TR-122b, weighs 95 times more than Jupiter but is only 16 percent as large, said the European Southern Observatory (ESO), which is in charge of the Paranal Observatory in Atacama desert, north Chile.
"Imagine you add 95 times Jupiter's mass and in spite of this you end up with a star that only is slightly as large," said Claudio Melo, a Chilean astronomer participating in the team.
"The body of the star gets contracted in order to give further room to additional matter, thus becoming more dense," Melo said.
The star has an incandescent core and releases its own shine and is in the direction of the Carina constellation in the Milky Way. It orbits around another star similar to the Sun, and takes one week to complete its revolution, the ESO said.
This is the first time that a direct observation shows there exist stars that, with less than 10 percent of the mass of the Sun, have similar size to giant planets like Jupiter.
"The results show the existence of starts that look strikingly like planets," said astronomer Frederic Pont, from Switzerland.
The discovery helps astronomers better understand a gray area of definition concerning stars and planets.
The observations were made a year ago, in March 2004, through Kueyen telescope, one of the four 8.2-meter telescopes in Paranal. Enditem
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